Anyone who’s followed the career of Whit Stillman wasn’t surprised to hear that he was adapting the obscure Jane Austen novella “Lady Susan” into his new film “Love & Friendship.” The writer/director established his Austen fandom with his first movie, 1990’s “Metropolitan,” which featured two characters debating the merits of “Mansfield Park” (while they themselves were in the middle of a story about young people and morality that resembled Austen’s book). Predictably, Stillman’s right at home with the late 18th-century costumes and vast manicured estates of “Love & Friendship.” He applies his usual dry wit and snappy pace to a complicated comic plot, which sees his “The Last Days Of Disco” stars Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny playing disreputable society ladies scheming for advancement and spite.
What’s genuinely unexpected about “Love & Friendship” is that it exists at all. Stillman is a notoriously slow worker, who’s only made five feature films during his quarter-century behind the camera. Some of that lack of productivity can be chalked up to the fickleness of the independent-cinema business, which has made it hard for him to raise funds for all the projects he’s wanted to do. But Stillman himself admits that he’s very exacting with his own work, and that it takes time for him to refine scripts properly.
The Playlist spoke with Stillman about the long road to “Love & Friendship,” and about the elements of his aesthetic and taste that define his output — including the three classic comedies (“Metropolitan,” “Barcelona,” and “The Last Days Of Disco”) recently collected into a features-packed Criterion Blu-ray box set.
As far back as 2006, you were talking about making a movie based on one or two unpublished Jane Austen novels. Exactly how long has this project been gestating?
Those were different projects, actually. This was my secret one. I have correspondence on it dating back to 2004; and I may have even started it earlier. I knew it was going to take a long period of time. It was always something I was working on when I wasn’t getting paid for something else. When I’d turn in a script for a paying job and had downtime, I’d come back to this. It was nice to do something just in the spirit of pleasure, rather than with blood, sweat, and tears.
How did it evolve over that decade?
It was mostly just taking tons of really good material and trying to put in the right dramatic shape for a modern story. Or not a modern story, but a dramatized story. There was a twofold nature to the creation. One was editorial: rearranging and structuring. And then there was a time when the characters started to take flight, and have their own problems and desires and aspirations. The Sir James Martin character has a rather small part in Austen’s story and in my initial script, but I had written a scene for him that was just an audition piece — the “church”/“hill” scene — and when Tom Bennett was cast, he made so much of it that I started writing more for him.
Lady Susan herself is so wonderfully nasty. She doesn’t seem mean-spirited, but she does awful things…
Oh, she’s a thoroughly bad character. She’s a bad woman. I worried that was going to be a problem, to have these two nasty ladies, plotting, scheming, and maligning everyone. I thought it might be too much toxic material for people to deal with. I remember the British distributor who I showed it to at Cannes in 2013, saying, “Oh, these horrible people. I could never do this.” But then her company ended up buying it. She changed her mind completely. I don’t know what the alchemy is, but Kate and Chloë playing it together makes them sort of fun and charming.
Did you have those two actresses in mind from the start?
I had Kate in mind. But Chloë was actually in the film first, way before we got it financed. Kate came in at the last moment. And gosh! [Laughs] She was my first idea, from the very beginning. When I first read the story, she was far too young for the part, but I think some friend of mine said, “With the way you write, by the time you finish she’ll be perfect.”
